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If Jean Guéhenno had never existed, France would surely have had to invent him. A model writer and intellectual who neither collaborated nor accommodated the enemy, he refused to publish a single word as long as his country was under Nazi control. A leading essayist of the Popular Front, regularly skewered by the far right, he vowed, as of July 1940, to confine his thoughts and feelings to a private journal. It is a mystery why “Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944,” first published in 1947 and still a standard reference in France, is only now appearing in English in a fine translation by David Ball. Is there something about our own political climate that allows us finally to hear Guéhenno’s voice clearly?
The son of a poor shoemaker and a veteran of World War I, Guéhenno (pronounced gay-AY-no) rose against all odds to the pinnacle of academic respectability. He was 50 and a teacher when he started keeping his diary, and he brought to his reflections on the occupation qualities missing in the younger generation of Resistance intellectuals: midlife melancholy and a fierce skepticism that didn’t preclude taking sides. Guéhenno was a left-wing Gaullist of the first hour, one of the few French who heard Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s June 18, 1940, call to resistance on the BBC, and rejoiced in “a voice with some pride in it at last.” In October 1940, when the French newspaper L’Oeuvre asked people to understand Marshal Philippe Pétain’s pact of collaboration with Hitler, Guéhenno wrote: “I’m just too proud and stupid: I think I have already understood. And I think of myself as an old, untuned guitar.”
That untuned guitar had pretty good pitch. As the anti-Semitic persecutions, the deportations of Jews and the arrests and executions of Communists intensified, Guéhenno tended to conflate their suffering in nationalist rhetoric: “The Germans’ repressive methods are such that there is not one Frenchman who will not feel his debt to the Jews and the Communists, jailed and shot for us. They are the veritable sacrificial victims of the people.” But as early as May 15, 1941, he saw that the two victims were not the same, and he understood who was accountable: “Yesterday, in the name of the laws of France, 5,000 Jews were taken away to concentration camps,” he wrote. When a friend is deported, he confesses, “I do not feel free to write everything down here.” The summer of 1944 brings hope from the Allies, but with it comes the fear of failure and loss of life. On June 10, 1944, in the aftermath of D-Day, he takes out his old hiking maps from Normandy to follow the Allied advance: “After the anguish of servitude, now the anxiety of combat.”
Guéhenno notes with characteristic modesty that he was able to maintain his silence as a writer only because his tenure as a professor guaranteed him a living. He prepared students for the rigorous entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure and taught in the vocational high schools. He writes beautifully about his students, the “hypercritical young intellectuals,” the future Resistance fighters, the snitches and collaborators. He marvels at their fate: A former Egyptologist becomes the head logger in a forest near Grenoble, France; another joins the armed resistance in the mountains; still another asks Guéhenno to broadcast on German controlled Radio Paris until “I set the poor boy straight without any further ado.”
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His diary became an important outlet for rage and disbelief. By January 1942 it was clear to him that Germany was going to lose the war, but that certain failure would only escalate the occupiers’ brutality. Guéhenno took solace in his work on a biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Experiencing as I do the life of my hero day after day, I am sometimes as curious about the next day as he might have been himself.” Abrupt transitions in his writing mimic the tensions of everyday life — Rousseau in one paragraph, the arrest and execution of the ethnographer Boris Vildé and six other intellectuals at Mont Valérien in the next. Guéhenno, who distributed the clandestine literary journal Les Lettres Françaises and kept the compromising pages of his diary in his apartment, might well have met with a similar fate.
Another milestone in the diary comes in 1943 when his students are drafted into compulsory work service in Germany; many escape to Spain or join resistance groups. Nor was Guéhenno exempt from the repression. That same year he was demoted by the Vichy education minister to the rank of a beginning instructor, assigned to teach 17 hours of class a week rather than the usual six and faced with supervising hundreds of students. “Stammering with fatigue,” he wondered how he would have time to keep his diary going. But he cheered up whenever he contemplated how many of the authors in his curriculum were bona fide revolutionaries: “Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Danton, Robespierre, Chénier, Hugo, Michelet ..., I have nothing to discuss but suspects.” He liked to end his class sessions by shouting “Et la liberté!”
Mr. Ball, who has succeeded in giving Guéhenno’s grand diction the emotional charge it has in the original French, has provided extensive notes, as well as a biographical dictionary, so that no reference is left obscure.
It is hard today to imagine a world in which the written word meant so much that one writer’s refusal to publish made him a national example of moral probity. Of course not every French writer of the Resistance agreed with Guéhenno’s position. His friend Jean Paulhan believed it was essential to keep literary institutions going, even if it meant dealing with Fascists while secretly pursuing Resistance activity.
But Guéhenno was clear. In November 1940, after only six months of occupation, he described life in occupied France as a prison sentence of indeterminate length. To keep hope alive, writers needed to turn inward and “paint on the walls” of their cells. He added, “whether our cell is full of light or not depends on us alone.” Four years later, he published an excerpt from his diaries with the underground Éditions de Minuit, using the title “In the Prison” and the pseudonym Cévennes. On Aug. 25, with church bells ringing, flags flying and the tanks of General Leclerc’s Second Armored Division rolled up to the doors of Notre-Dame, Jean Guéhenno was finally ready to end his literary exile: “Freedom — France is beginning again.”